McCaffery: In their final game, Flyers paid for their earlier failures

Flyers right wing Matt Read skates away as the Rangers’ Benoit Pouliot celebrates with teammates after scoring a goal during the second period of Game 7 Wednesday night, a 2-1 season-ending defeat for the Flyers. (AP Photo)

NEW YORK — Because it sounded good, because that’s what was expected, the Flyers took their Game 7 opportunity in Madison Square Garden Wednesday and made it sound like it was their choice.

“When you’re young, and you are playing in your driveway,” Wayne Simmonds said, outside the locker room, before the game, “definitely, this is what you dream of.”

Such was the theme, as it had been between the Flyers winning Game 6 at home and losing Game 7, and their season, 2-1 Wednesday in Madison Square Garden.

“If you would ask a lot of people at the start of the series what they wanted,” Brayden Schenn had said, “most people would’ve said, ‘A win in seven.’ These two teams compete pretty hard out there and anything can happen in Game 7.”

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And so it went, relentlessly, echoing from one corner of the room to the other and, by all means, from the microphone in front of Craig Berube.

“I don’t think it matters how you get to Game 7,” the head coach would proclaim. “We’re there.”

Not that the Flyers were satisfied with simply stretching their first-round playoff series to the snapping point, because nothing in their effort Wednesday hinted at complacency. Rather, they were active and thoughtful with the puck, attentive on defense, not quick to take unthinking penalties. They were ready for Game 7. They just lost. Henrik Lundqvist was ripe to steal one of the seven games, so he did. The Rangers were expected to block shots, and they did, with all of their body parts.

In what had been reduced to the one-game series, New York was better. Confusing?

Yet that was the Flyers’ problem: They never should have been twisted into that position. But for sins committed earlier, and for at least one decision that well could haunt Berube for what should be a productive coaching career, they were.

Two standings points. That’s all that had separated the Rangers and Flyers through 82 regular-season games. A point here, a point there, a shootout that did not end in a thud, a bad goal avoided. Yet because of that, Game 7 was played in the Garden, not the Wells Fargo Center. For that, the Rangers had the tiny benefit of the home crowd in a one-game series, and the significant edge that would come with Alain Vigneault having the last line change.

Two points.

Two of them.

And too many wasted opportunities to close that gap.

What would have happened had the Flyers not wasted the first three games of their season with Peter Laviolette as their coach? What would have happened had Paul Holmgren trusted his gut and made the difficult change in the offseason?

What would have happened had the Flyers not begun the season 1-7, in part because they were adjusting to Berube, who had no training camp?

Wouldn’t it have been different had they not arrived in late March, did the stare-down thing with the Rangers in a bubbling fight for second place in the Metro, and stumbled into a seven-game losing streak?

Considering the early-season coaching confusion and the late-season fatigue that came from climbing out of all that early trouble, the Flyers could have — no they should have — finished in second place, with its first-round comforts. And that’s what made Berube’s rationalization hollow.

It did matter, actually, how the Flyers wound up in Game 7 — at least that Game 7, in that spot, in that arena where they had just broken an eight-game losing streak. It mattered that they wasted so many chances on shootouts. It even mattered that in Game 3 of the series, Berube trusted Ray Emery, not Steve Mason. Had he played his $12 million goaltender for more than the final seven hopeless minutes that game, there may not have been that one final difficult excursion to Madison Square Garden.

“They are very good,” Kimmo Timonen said, “especially in their building.”

The Flyers should not have been in that building Wednesday. But they were. And that’s why they will be at their lockers later this week, packing equipment, waiting yet another year for their next Stanley Cup.

That’s why they will be doing something else that never was their choice.